Mary Carmichael has a fantastic piece in Nature (free registration required, annoyingly) about a Minnesotan woman who has devoted her life to attacking newborn screening programs. It’s a suitably balanced article: while the anti-screening activists engage in brazen hyperbole against a system that has unquestionably saved many lives, Carmichael doesn’t shirk away from noting that there have also been abuses of privacy. It’s not a debate that will be going away any time soon. [DM]

Colm O’Dushlaine, a scientist at the Broad Institute, has been analysing his 23andMe data in various ways and documenting his methods and results online. If you’re savvy enough to use the Unix command line you’ll find some useful tips for mining your own data. [DM]

Various Genomes Unzipped members have made the transition to Google’s much-discussed new social media platform, Google Plus. You can find Daniel here, Dan here, Joe here, Luke here and Vince here. [DM]

Answer: no. Yet many of those projects are not only used in academic papers, they are the foundation for huge websites that all of us use on a daily basis.

Reason #1: for one thing, open source code usually actually works, whereas most papers are written to obscure exactly what the academic is doing so that they can retain that edge over the competition. Just try getting a raw dataset or key reagent out of some of these people.

Reason #2: no one can stop you from putting something on github. We recognize at the beginning that there will always be haters for every project. Fine, this work isn’t for them, ignore. Can you imagine if a Python developer had to please some randomly chosen Java developer before showing his work to a mass audience?